My name's Seth Friedman
and I've been in the news lately because I was outed
as having been one of the spies working on Harvey Weinstein's behalf.
Black cube are effectively a private intelligence agency.
Anything that the clients want is available and carried out
by people who've usually been trained in Israeli intelligence, in Mossad
and other intelligence agencies.
I was told they've taken on a new case, it's in Hollywood.
Normally you wouldn't know who the client is but in this case
it was clear that it was Harvey Weinstein.
I was told there's a plot against him
and that various people are involved in trying to smear him
and put out all kinds of negative publicity
whether in the press or in the industry and so on.
And the first list that I saw of targets, or potential
people who were carrying out this campaign, was from memory
like five men and one woman.
The list of people that Harvey wanted us to go after grew bigger.
It culminated in 91 names.
You know, actors and actresses who'd worked for him in the past
and who didn't seem like they would be involved in a current plot against him
but again, you're just doing your job.
I'm not asking: 'are they relevant?'
I'm just told that's who you're going after today.
The list was updated by Harvey
and it had Rose McGowan's name on, the actress.
Through her agent, I called up and said my normal thing:
"My name's Seth Freedman, I used to write for The Guardian,
I'm doing a big broadstrokes piece about life in Hollywood now
compared to how it was 20 years ago."
So we're doing a bigger piece on Hollywood and what life is like
for anyone in 2016-17.
And obviously, my researcher gives me your details -
So do you have specific questions?
Literally we're just talking about her entire career.
At no point do I mention Weinstein because that's not what I'm there to do.
I don't even know what the allegations are necessarily at this point.
And she brought it up.
She said: "I was attacked by this director, I'm going to tell all of this in my book."
My book is going to address a lot of these things.
If someone was to say, "you hadn't gone to the police"
or, "you haven't proved it", how can you get the publisher
to publish it?
Well that's because I actually have a signed document
from the time of the attack.
Right.
It was settled for a very small settlement,
it was settled.
It was an admission of guilt.
So... what would make you kind of call it quits?
Nothing.
Nothing at all?
No.
I asked her things like: "What did you do?
Did you go to the police?
Did you sign a non-disclosure agreement?"
And then it moves on.
Because this is a huge, huge interview in theory
and we must have spoken about him for a minute, two minutes max.
Obviously I give that recording to Black Cube,
it's shared with Harvey Weinstein and his legal team
and they can see, OK that might be what she's planning
to do with her book.
Now again, I don't care if people want to sit and sermonise
and say: 'Oh that's so awful, she was a survivor' and so on and so forth.
None of this is attested in court, so as far as I'm concerned
I'm totally neutral about the whole thing.
This is not a case of Harvey Weinstein calls Black Cube and says:
'Such and such number of people are accusing me of sexual assault,
can you help me?'
That just didn't happen.
There's this strapline that's constantly trotted out in the press
that Black Cube were hired to intimidate, harass and silence his victims.
No intimidation, no silencing, no harassing.
All of those things would be illegal and none of those things happened.
You can't see any evidence of this happening but it's the
go-to phrase to paint it as him effectively having an army of spies
behind him to shut everyone down.
Most of the silencing, if there ever was silencing
was done many years ago and long before Black Cube were involved.
People who'd made allegations against Weinstein
for some reason didn't go to the police
for some reason were advised to sign NDAs.
Do you feel guilty about making that call to Rose McGowan?
I don't feel guilty about anything I did for Black Cube.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned if you're an actress
who works in Hollywood and a reporter calls you
and you decide to talk to them, that's pretty run of the mill.
I think the problem with how toxic this debate is over the Weinstein case
is that if you say anything that sounds like you're dissenting
from the #metoo narrative, therefore you're on his side
and you support him.
I don't know the guy, I couldn't really care less
one way or the other what happens to him.
I remember vividly when it was my bar mitzvah
someone bought me a pair of binoculars which actually
looking back, led to where I am now
sitting in front of you.
All it is is just another method to look over someone's shoulder
or to like, read someone's diary, whatever it is
just to get information, not for any nefarious purpose
you don't do anything with it.
It's just a fascinating way to delve into other people's lives.
And I don't think I'm any different from anyone else in that sense
You don't look like a spy.
What does a spy look like?
I think I look very much like a spy.
There's too much hype around what it means to be a spy
people have just got so many preconceptions
that you must be like, a psychopath or cold
or no emotions, or this or that
or like an evil person.
If you actually saw what it takes -
you actually show huge amounts of empathy to people.
To get close to someone you can't be cold and detached.
Obviously it's not nice underneath it
because you know that the whole thing is a facade.
If someone appears out of nowhere, they are not to be just talked to
on the spot and too many people do it.
Do you still work for Black Cube?
I don't work for Black Cube.
I do some small pieces of work on a kind of case by case basis
if people come to me and say who do you know or
who could help me on similar things but I don't work for Black Cube.
How do we know you're telling the truth?
You've got no idea if I'm telling the truth.
My job is to get a piece of information that isn't freely available
and as long as I stay within the letter of the law
I'm not worried about your ethics when you judge me.
I don't need to sit and stare down the camera
and say: 'I'm so guilty, I'm so sorry'.
Because I'm not.